Mennekes Elektrotechnik Puts SAP Environment on a Virtual Infrastructure

DataCore Software announced that MENNEKES Elektrotechnik GmbH & Co. KG, a specialist in the field of plugs and sockets for cargo containers on ships and at terminals, has migrated its complete SAP environment onto a virtual infrastructure with VMware and DataCore Software on Dell hardware. A software-based approach utilizing DataCore has meant that further investments into costly SAN hardware have been avoided. MENNEKES today benefits from a high-performance infrastructure – an agile environment with the potential for even further cost savings.

 
MENNEKES Elektrotechnik GmbH & Co. is a manufacturer and supplier of electronic plugs, receptacles, connectors and sockets as well as ready-wired receptacle combinations for cargo containers on ships and at terminals. When they planned their implementation of VMware ESX, the company had to reevaluate whether their existing, direct-attached storage infrastructure was capable to the task of delivering the needed storage to the virtual servers. The company evaluated several offers for hardware-based SAN solutions from manufacturers such as IBM, NetApp and HP. Finally, MENNEKES’ long-time IT partner, Networkers, introduced the company to the power of storage virtualization with SANmelody from DataCore Software. Now MENNEKES has a radically simple, high availability, storage virtualization solution designed to meet the needs of VMware-virtualized IT environments.
 
Higher Performance
“We went with DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualization software solution because of its higher flexibility and its hardware independence – particularly for when we require capacity expansions, as well as the very good price/performance in comparison to a hardware SAN,” states Jürgen Bechtel, CIO, MENNEKES. “SAP was the critical element in the project because the SAP system places the highest load and the greatest demand on both performance and on the need for availability. The result was very positive – SAP runs on SANmelody, with more performance than on the network-attached storage from NetApp. The DataCore solution simply proved itself.”
 
MENNEKES’ IT partner Networkers did the installation as well as the data migration onsite. As a first step, four Dell PowerEdge 2950 with VMware Infrastructure 3 and two Dell PowerEdge 2900s with DataCore SANmelody 2.0 were installed. They were connected to two Dell disk subsystems with 3 TB SAS disks via a SAS RAID controller. The VMware server was then connected to the SAN 4-Gbit Fibre Channel infrastructure. In the second step, additional ESX servers were integrated and capacity was easily extended with SATA disks. This resulted in a virtual infrastructure that today comprises six ESX servers and 50 VMs as well as 8 TBs of SAS and SATA hardware spread among two data centers.
 
High Availability Is Key
After the migration of many different applications such as file services, CAD applications, ProE construction software, access control, etc., SAP R3 – including all the ERP modules and the very performance demanding SAP databases – were migrated from the NAS onto the DataCore SAN. Finally, business WAN servers, which support MENNEKES subsidiaries, were virtualized as well.
 
Today, the virtual infrastructure is an important part and contributor to the overall business success of MENNEKES. For this project, CIO Jürgen Bechtel was selected among the Top 10 CIOs in 2008 by Germany‘s leading professional computing magazine Computerwoche.
 
Jürgen Bechtel summarizes the deployment as follows: “High availability of storage in a consolidated environment with VMware is an absolute MUST. SANmelody not only provides us with the required high availability, but it also offers hardware independence, flexibility and the opportunity to easily expand with hardware of our choice. The costs of a conventional SAN with mirroring would be multiple times more costly. ”